1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a mobile advertising system offering differentiated personalized Mobile Advertising (MobAd) services to users, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for managing advertisement applications stored in a terminal receiving advertisements in a mobile advertising system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a group which studies the standard for interworking between individual mobile solutions. The OMA serves to define various application standards for mobile games, Internet services and the like. Of the OMA working groups, Open Mobile Alliance REQuirement (OMA REQ) Working Group and Open Mobile Alliance Content Delivery (OMA CD) Working Group are conducting research on the technology standard for offering MobAd services.
With reference to FIG. 1, a description will be made of components and their operation in a mobile advertising system to which the mobile advertising service technology is applied.
FIG. 1 illustrates components and interfaces between them in a conventional mobile advertising system. Referring to FIG. 1, the mobile advertising system mainly includes an Advertising Engine (Ad Engine) and an Advertising Server (Ad Server). The Ad Engine corresponds to an advertising client 100 and the Ad Server to an advertising server 110.
The advertising client 100 is a functional group of logical modules, and situated in a terminal where it receives advertisements and accesses to the advertising server 110 using a To Be Determined (TBD)-2 interface. The advertising client 100 interacts with several different Advertisement Applications (Ad App) 130. The advertisement application 130 supports a useful function capable of accessing a mobile advertising service provided by the advertising client 100, and uses a TBD-3 interface for communication with the advertising client 100. In addition, the advertising client 100 exchanges service management information with the advertising server 110, receives a proper advertisement from the advertising server 110, manages the received advertisement, selects an advertisement from a storage in the terminal, provides an advertisement-related feedback to the advertising server 110, and performs filtering.
The advertising server 110 provides a network function based on an application regarding a mobile advertising service. The advertising server 110 exchanges service management information with the advertising client 100, and provides an advertisement and an advertisement notification to the advertising client 100. A TBD-1 interface is used between the advertising server 110 and a Service Provider Application (SP App) 120 that provides mobile advertisements. A Contextualization and Personalization (C&P) module 140 communicates with the advertising server 110 using a TBD-4 interface, and with the advertising client 100 using a TBD-5 interface.
The mobile advertising system of FIG. 1 may deliver advertisements in two different methods. In a first method, the advertising server 110 provides an advertisement in reply to an advertisement request from a terminal. That is, when there is a new advertisement or when the existing advertisement is updated, the advertising client 100 may send a request for the advertisement and the advertisement metadata to the advertising server 110 using an advertisement request message. Then the advertising server 110 may deliver to the advertising client 100 in the terminal a personalized advertisement created by considering contextual information such as a location of the terminal's user and the stored state, and personalization information such as user's sex, age, hobbies and interests.
Upon receiving an advertisement request message from the advertisement application 130 after caching or storing the advertisement(s) provided from the advertising server 110, the advertising client 100 selects an advertisement satisfying a certain condition, and delivers the selected advertisement to the advertisement application 130. The advertisement request message may have profile information including a format, a codec, a screen size, a resolution and the like supportable by the advertisement application 130, such as flash, image, audio, video and text.
If there is no advertisement being matched to an application profile among the advertisements stored in the advertising client 100, the advertising client 100 sends an advertisement request message including the application profile to the advertising server 110. Then, advertising server 110 searches for an advertisement being matched to the application profile included in the advertisement request message, and delivers the searched advertisement to the advertising client 100.
In a second method, without a request from the advertising client 100, the advertising server 110 directly delivers an arbitrary advertisement to the advertising client 100 in a timely manner.
However, the conventional mobile advertising system is incapable of managing the advertisement applications installed in the terminal. Thus, even though the advertising client 100 has cached the advertisements downloaded from the advertising server 110, if a plurality of advertisement applications is installed in the terminal, it is difficult to find a matched advertisement application. Hence, the advertising client 100 may inefficiently deliver the same advertisement to each of the plural advertisement applications. Otherwise, the advertising client 100 must select an optimal application from among the plural advertisement applications installed in the terminal, but the selection is impossible in the conventional system. In addition, the advertising client 100 must download and install the advertisement application if it is not already installed in the terminal. However, since the advertisement implementation is delayed, the advertisement provider may not provide the advertisement to the user at a desired time.
Such problems may be resolved if the advertising server 110 selects during advertisement delivery an optimal advertisement for the terminal and designates an optimal advertisement application that will represent the selected advertisement. Since the conventional advertising server 110 cannot detect information about the advertisement applications installed in the terminal, it has a problem in selecting the optimal advertisement and/or designating the optimal advertisement application that will represent the selected advertisement.
Moreover, every time the advertisement application sends an advertisement request message to the advertising client 100, it must inconveniently transmit an application profile in the message, thereby increasing a message capacity and thus compromising efficiency of network resources.